Two weeks ago I visited the 2016 edition of the European Maker Faire in Rome. The Rome fair can be reached easily with the train that goes between Rome center (mostly Tiburtina station) and the airport of Fiumicino. The whole fair has ten pavilions, and the Maker Faire managed to fill six of them with all […]

Maker Faire will come to Rome in the weekend of 14-15-16 October 2016, and I plan to go there. The faire format is by Make Magazine, and gathers the makers from all around the globe, so that they have the possibility to interact and showcase their work and their art. The maker movement has gained traction […]

A course on the theories and implementations of real-time systems is about to start on Coursera platform. The course comes from the Finnish University Åbo Akademi, and lasts 5 weeks of low workload (2-3h per week). The instructor entices the learner by showing a famous real-time system failure, during the landing of the Apollo 11 on the surface of the […]

The ST Nucleo is an Arduino-like board with an STM32 as the microcontroller, and many Arduino shields can be mounted on it. I recently played with an Ethernet shield for the network connection, but since the shield also contains a microSD card slot, I wanted to access the SD card to read/write files. I’d like to […]

The following resource is a thoughtful checklist that embedded software developers can take as inspiration to improve the product. It also links to further resources (as well as the author’s book) to explore the topics and analyze in depth the rationale of some of his suggestions. Better Embedded System SW: Top 5 Embedded Software Problem Areas – Five areas to dig into […]

The desktop where I do most of my stuff is a Debian testing 32bit. Recently Google Chrome team declared the end of support of 32bit Linux distributions, and I decided to take the occasion to migrate towards a 64bit Debian. I read some guides around, some old, some with big warnings and disclaimers, some interesting. Ultimately I […]

The news site lwn just posted a guide on GCC inline assembly. The guide is written in plain colloquial language and is a great complement to GCC documentation on the matter, which is more of a reference of the various functionalities. I found that the extended form of inline assembly is a powerful way to use the machine special […]